Ed Smith was a famously unlucky cricketer. A talented county player, he was picked fairly late for England and after a run of poor scores was soon facing his make-or-break innings against South Africa in 2003. Just as he was getting going he was given out to a very bad umpiring decision. This was doubly unfortunate: not only was he the victim of someone else's incompetence but if it had happened today he could have used technology to review the decision and get a reprieve. After that, who knows what might have happened. As it was, he never played for England again.

You feel this piece of misfortune lies behind Smith's interest in the subject of his new book. But one of the problems is that he can't say much about it, having already mined it for all it was worth in his previous book, What Sport Tells Us About Life. So this time round he dwells on other moments from his life to highlight the role of luck. We're told at length about how his cricketing career was ended by injury, which was certainly unlucky but is hardly unusual. However, the main event in this book concerns love, not sport. Smith met the woman who is now his wife by purest chance on a train that neither he nor she had been planning to take. Other people might call this fate but he puts it down to luck. He feels he is a very lucky man.

His theme is that we tend to downplay luck and talk up things such as fate, because we don't like the way luck makes us feel incidental to our own lives. Smith thinks accepting the role of luck is essential for keeping a sense of perspective, particularly for people who like to claim the credit for all their own success. But there is a kind of faux-humility about this: Smith's relentless harping on his own experiences jars with the thought that our lives are shot through with randomness. Take the meeting with his future wife. It's a nice enough dinner-party story, but he makes too much of it. It's not like those cases of people who change travel plans and end up escaping death because the plane they were booked on crashes. These are spectacular pieces of luck because very few planes crash. But most people get married. Would Smith have remained loveless and single if he had missed that train? Or would he simply have married someone else? Sorry to be unromantic, but I suspect it's the second.

One of Smith's aims is to challenge the view popularised by writers such as Malcolm Gladwell that what really makes the difference to success is practice and hard work. Smith thinks that downplays the good fortune of those who have the genetic and social advantages to be able to undertake the hard work. This is true enough, but the comparison with Gladwell highlights what's really wrong with this book. Partly it's a sense that the genre is starting to cannibalise itself. There is a world of fascinating material out there on luck written by philosophers, novelists, historians – but Smith's frame of reference is primarily pop psychology books of the past few years. The main problem, though, is that people like Gladwell do it so much better.

Gladwell's writing is consistently surprising: he usually asks the extra question that wouldn't occur to the reader. Smith is almost never surprising and he usually stops asking questions just at the point it's getting interesting. He harps on the nature v nurture question, flagging up sportsmen such as Roger Federer who are so naturally talented that it would be absurd to put it all down to how they have trained. But what about the world's current best tennis player, Novak Djokovic, who seems to have willed his way to the top (and who, by all accounts, Federer loathes because he thinks he's been lucky)? The dichotomy of luck v hard work is much too crude. There are lots of different kinds of nurture, including getting a leg up from others. This book comes plastered with puffs from Smith's friends and colleagues. It seems ridiculous to call this mere luck, but equally ridiculous to think it must therefore reflect merit. The world of personal connections is much trickier than that.

The book contains a number of interviews with people known for their strong views about luck, such as Black Swan author Nassim Taleb. A lot of these read like warmed-up newspaper pieces and tell us little we haven't heard before. It says something that perhaps the most interesting exchange is with the golfer Colin Montgomerie, who explains how holes-in-one are not just lucky, they're usually a mistake. Professional golfers are aiming to hit the ball a little below the hole so as not to be on the wrong side and faced with a downhill put. Getting it straight into the hole from distance means you've been a little reckless. It would have been nice to know what other areas of life might suffer from the bad shot/good shot conundrum: high finance, maybe, where hitting your targets means you've got too close to missing them on the wrong side. All Smith will say of these puzzles is that "It is enough to send you mad."

As well as being a journalist and cricketer, Smith is a trained historian. He includes a chapter on Winston Churchill, who was nearly killed in a car accident in 1931. The moral is: how lucky for him and for us that he wasn't! This is typical of the book, managing to be both obvious and implausible at the same time. Yes, history would have been very different, but surely not in the crudely schematic ways Smith suggests ("A successful German invasion … an occupied Nazi Britain"). There is a nasty whiff here that he is talking down to his readers, fearful of bamboozling them with the true complexities of historical contingency. This is a mistake: the story he wants to tell is more complicated than he makes out, but making a complex story clear and readable takes plenty of skill and a lot of hard work. Smith was a good cricketer, he is a talented journalist and doubtless he is also a good historian. But with this insubstantial and unconvincing book, he's pushing his luck.